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MY SUNGLASSES FOGGED up the minute we stepped outside, so great was the difference between the refrigerated air of the Student Retention Office and the humid outdoors. I removed my temporarily opaque eyewear and shielded my eyes with my hand.
“So Marshall Dixon works for the Student Retention Office now?” Emma squinted at me. “I thought she was higher ranking.”
“It’s an administrative thing,” I said. “They keep moving positions into the SRO, so the SRO’s grant can cover the salaries. That’s one of the reasons they keep growing.”
“Have you ever noticed how the Student Retention Office Complex is mauka of the campus, above everyone else?” Emma said.
I turned and squinted back at the soaring glass and metal edifice looming over the squat, tin-roofed buildings below it.
“The symbolism is purely accidental, I’m sure.”
“They think they run the place,” Emma said.
“They do run the place. They decided the psych department’s required stats sequence was ‘discouraging’ students. Next thing you know, statistics is optional. Students complain history is boring. Boom. History’s no longer a graduation requirement. Oh, and remember what happened to our computer engineering major?”
“I keep forgetting we used to have a computer engineering major,” Emma said. “Hey, you have to be anywhere right now? I wanna go back to your office and check out Primo Nordmann’s blog.”
“I thought they didn’t want us doing any more research for the grant right now.”
“Nah, nah. They don’t want us doing it publicly, that’s all. We can go online an’ look stuff up. Who’s gonna know?”
We were coming up on the double glass doors of the library.
“Okay. But let’s do it here. Not in my office.”
“The library?” Emma asked.
“The library computers are open to everyone, so they can’t trace who’s using them. The computers in the library lab don’t require a login. Not to sound paranoid or anything, but they told us to back off, and I’m pretty sure they can see what we do on our office computers.”
“You mean you don’t wanna end up broken on the rack, which is probably what happened to that poor schlemiel who did that cash register commercial.”
“Exactly.”
The library’s glass door wheezed open to admit Emma and me to an architectural time capsule. The terrazzo floor, teak shelves, and avocado vinyl chairs with the chrome legs had been installed somewhere around the middle of the last century. The original plans had been drawn up before such a thing as a student computer lab existed, so the lab was an add-on afterthought, tucked behind the government documents collection. The lab looked sparsely populated, but it wasn’t for lack of student demand. It was because most of the available monitors were connected to nothing. Most of the computers had died and never been replaced.
Once Emma and I finally claimed a functioning computer, a quick search turned up Primo Nordmann online.
“Bananawrangler-dot-com,” Emma exclaimed. “His website is called Banana Wrangler?”
Emma’s voice echoed in the suddenly quiet computer lab. Two girls at the next station turned from their spreadsheet to stare at us.
“I think it’s supposed to be a reference to his diet,” I whispered. “Look. Tantric Zenmaster. Fruititarian Warrior.”
“Are you sure?” Emma said. “Cause he likes to eat fruit? Cause to me, banana wrangler sounds like a double entenuendo.”
“Emma, there’s no such word as—”
“Oh, this guy. I remember him. He was the older student who would come by your office all the time, right? And give you those flyers about how to take care of your colon and stuff?”
“That’s Primo,” I agreed.
“I loved how you’d always get rid of him by saying you had to go to a meeting right then, like, ‘Oh, I’m late to my two-seventeen meeting,’ like anyone would schedule a meeting at two-seventeen.”
Bananawrangler-dot-com wasn’t a great example of state-of-the-art website design. It had five columns of small print in various typefaces interspersed with pictures of Primo. The photos showed him variously chinning up on a tree branch, stuffing jaboticaba berries into his mouth, and performing a one-armed balancing plank on the low rock wall fronting Mahina Harbor.
“How come he has his shirt off in all his pictures?” Emma asked.
“I guess he’s proud of his physique.”
“He looks like a scarecrow. Let’s see what else there is.” She moved the mouse and clicked, and we waited for the superannuated graphics processor to refresh the screen. “Well this is interesting.”
Primo’s last blog entry featured a photograph of Randy Randolph, Community Liaison for Seed Solutions. The picture looked like it might have been lifted from the company website. Randy Randolph wore a suit and tie, and looked at least ten years younger than he had last night.
The post was titled Five Things You Need to Know about Seed Solutions.
“Number one,” I read. “Randy Randolph is a gigantic—oh dear. Primo really went for the ad hominem here.”
“Whoa, three drunk driving arrests. And a link to Randolph’s divorce papers. Hey, you think Randy Randolph is the one who hacked Primo into stew meat?”
The spreadsheet girls glared at us.
“Let me print this to an image file and mail it to myself,” I said.
“Just send yourself the link,” Emma said.
“What if the page gets taken down?”
“Everything gets cached,” Emma said.
“I’m not going to count on it. Oh wait, if I mail this to my address then there’ll be a record of it. I’ll just send it to Detective Medeiros. No wait, I don’t think Mahina PD has email.”
“Send it to me then,” Emma said. “I wanna show Yoshi.”
“Is your husband involved in this biotech thing?”
“Nah. Just, he was feeling kind of down the other day about how everyone else from his MBA class was Somebody now, and he was just a freelance artist. He was even saying he shoulda had that Seed Solutions job instead of Randy Randolph. He’ll feel better when he finds out what a schmuck Randolph is.”
“Okay, sending it now. Happy to help spread a little sunshine. Ready to go?”
As Emma and I reached the turnstile to exit the library, Emma said, “Hey, isn’t that Donnie? What’s he doing here?”